Khronos Blog

Universal Scene Description (OpenUSD) is a high-performance, extensible software platform for collaboratively creating, editing, and simulating complex 3D scenes. OpenUSD is more than a file format and scene representation—it's an extensible framework of libraries, tools, and plugins. This includes the Hydra rendering framework, an open source OpenUSD framework that decouples scene descriptions from renderers, and the Storm renderer, a rasterizer aimed at performance and scalability.

ANARI™ is the industry’s open standard, cross-platform 3D rendering engine API developed by the Khronos Group to provide portable access to sophisticated 3D functionality including ray tracing and global illumination. ANARI is already widely used by scientific visualization applications and is implemented over multiple rendering engines, including AMD’s RadeonProRender, Intel’s OSPRay, and NVIDIA’s VisRTX, among others. ANARI is developed with full public access to the specification and has recently incorporated significant community feedback, including improvements to the object interface, better error handling through guaranteed API stream robustness, revamped runtime feature queries, directly mapped array parameters, improved volume shading, and compatibility with the Khronos glTF™ Physically-Based Rendering (PBR) materials.

Today, the Khronos 3D Formats Working Group is pleased to announce that the glTF 2.0 Interactivity Extension (KHR_interactivity) specification draft is available for public review and feedback before ratification. This new extension uses behavior graphs, enabling content creators to add logic and behaviors to glTF assets, with a focus on safety, portability and ease of implementation.

In a world where AI, HPC and Safety-Critical acceleration is shifting toward heterogeneous architectures that integrate processors with different architectures from multiple vendors, the need for seamless interoperability and shared open standards has never been more critical. That's why the UXL Foundation (Unified Acceleration) and the Khronos Group have entered into a liaison agreement to help accelerate the evolution of open accelerated heterogeneous programming.

The XR_EXT_local_floor extension recently made its way into the core specification with the release of OpenXR 1.1. In this blog post, we will delve into the technical aspects of the LOCAL_FLOOR [1] reference space. While STAGE space is still available to developers for defining playspace bounds, we will show how LOCAL_FLOOR offers a convenient alternative for obtaining a recenterable floor space that does not require user calibration. Additionally, we will explore how this extension includes an estimated floor height, adding further convenience to XR development workflows.

Vulkan® Portability™ is a Khronos® initiative to promote the consistent use of Vulkan functionality that is layered over other underlying APIs to enable the portable deployment of Vulkan applications on platforms without Vulkan native drivers, such as Apple’s macOS and iOS. In March 2024, Richard Wright from LunarG updated the State of Vulkan on Apple Devices white paper to reflect the latest availability of the Vulkan SDK on Apple platforms, and its ability to be used to develop applications that are fully compatible with the Apple App Store.

The Khronos Group has released a free OpenXR Tutorial, designed to guide software developers through every step of creating an OpenXR application using Windows, Linux or Android. This web-based tutorial, produced by the OpenXR Working Group, is packed with detailed instructions, downloadable archives, and example code snippets to support developers as they set up an OpenXR development environment, connect to their preferred graphics API, and incorporate interactivity, extensions, and other advanced features.

In this blog, Alfredo reflects on OpenXR development within Khronos over the last 12 months, including updates to the specification, the release of multiple extensions to support the latest XR developments, plus an evolving suite of tools that has kept OpenXR at the forefront of cross-platform XR innovation. Alfredo will also provide a glimpse of what the XR community can look forward to in 2024.

The Vulkan Working Group at Khronos has developed a set of video format decode and encode extensions, collectively referred to as Vulkan Video. Today, with the release of Vulkan 1.3.277, the Working Group is proud to announce the new Decode AV1 video extension. Similar to the Vulkan project in its goals, AV1 is a royalty-free open standard for video compression developed by the Alliance for Open Media (AOM) delivering industry-leading performance and quality. The result of broad industry collaboration and support, the Decode AV1 extension is a major milestone that builds on the foundation of Vulkan Video to bring cross-platform portable and performant AV1 decode to engines and applications everywhere.

The SPIR™ Working Group has developed two new SPIR-V extensions (and corresponding Vulkan® extensions) to provide shader authors with more guarantees about the execution model of shaders. These extensions formalize behavior many authors have previously taken for granted, so that they can now be relied upon across the ecosystem.

Today we’re happy to announce the release of VK_KHR_dynamic_rendering_local_read, which adds support for local dependencies to dynamic rendering; enabling developers to fully move over to dynamic rendering as support is rolled out.

Monado is a free cross-platform, open-source AR and VR software framework that provides the fundamental building blocks required by developers and device vendors to jump-start their XR development. In 2023, Khronos issued a request for proposals to accelerate improvements and updates to the Monado project.The Monado Upgrade Project will help bolster the XR ecosystem by enhancing the general usability of Monado for XR display and companion devices while strengthening key features essential to the Khronos OpenXR Working Group.

In April 2021, the Vulkan® Working Group at Khronos® released a set of provisional extensions, collectively referred to as ‘Vulkan Video’ which provide seamless encoding and decoding of video streams using a variety of video coding standards. The December 2022 release of Vulkan 1.3.238 saw the finalization of the extensions to decode H.264 and H.265, and today, with the release of Vulkan 1.3.274, Khronos has finalized their counterpart: the extensions to enable encoding of H.264 and H.265 video streams. Leveraging the Vulkan framework, they provide a standardized, seamless, low-overhead, and highly controllable way to produce H.264 and H.265 video via hardware accelerators, with applications ranging from real-time, low-latency streaming to offline server-scale transcoding.

In a world where 3D content creation and distribution are rapidly evolving, the need for seamless interoperability and shared standards has never been more critical. That's why the Alliance for OpenUSD (AOUSD) and Khronos Group have signed a liaison agreement to align and enhance OpenUSD and glTF technologies. This liaison marks a significant step towards unified 3D asset creation and deployment, streamlining the process for developers and end-users alike.

SYnergy research project enables energy efficient C++ based heterogeneous parallel programming with the Khronos SYCL API In high performance computing, creating energy efficiencies has become critical - from the design of cooling systems to the development of low-power hardware architectures. Processor hardware can help reduce power consumption by using dynamic voltage and frequency scaling.  Many GPU vendors provide APIs to take